When it comes to setting up a new website, there are hundreds of choices as for where you want your website to live.  And hundreds of choices of companies that you want to purchase your domain through.  One of the best-known companies is Godaddy, they are very well known for their advertising about how fast and easy it is to get a website started.  While they are a great place to purchase your domain name at a very affordable price and easily manage it;  for hosting they are a terrible value proposition.

Here are just a few of the reasons that we do not recommend Godaddy as the place for your new website to live.

The first is that the control panel known as the Cpanel is a design that only they use whereas the rest of the companies use a standard Cpanel meaning that it is easy to configure and follows set rules. Without a standard Cpanel moving a website to another host is more difficult and there are many limitations that they place on your site for its future use.  When you have outgrown Godaddy and want to move it to a new server you will have a difficult time doing so because of the way that they have their servers set up.   What should take two or three hours to move a database can in many cases take an entire day worth of work.

The second reason that you should avoid Godaddy for web hosting services is that they are working on what is known as a shared server.  Having a shared server means that thousands of different websites are all living on the same computer and having to share the power of that one computer and its resources. If only one of those websites is very popular on a particular day it will take the resources from your website and slow it down or stop it entirely.  It has also been my experience that some of the sites that are on Godaddy have viruses and with their security setting, it is easy for those viruses to spread.

Thirdly Godaddy is an expensive proposition,  at first it may not seem to be because the fee’s for Godaddy web hosting seem to be quite reasonable.  Where you will pay more is in getting things done. Because Godaddy is a system that has several quirks and things that do not work as standard what should only take an hour or two to build or repair can take five or six hours instead.  This extra time in labor is going to cost the client far more than if they used a better quality hosting provider from the beginning.

We recommend using the web host  BlueHost it is quite affordable for less than $100 for the entire year of quality web hosting.  Many of our clients are using this system and we have yet to have any issues.  The great thing about using A Small Orange is that you can host many websites on the same plan for just $50 per year.  There are tools to enable easy email setup and it includes a full featured Cpanel with each account.

We recommend the basic or medium plan  a month plan for most clients,